Quotes from Tim O'Brien

Working as a journalist, I was always tempted to lie. I felt I could do dialogue better than the person I was interviewing. I felt I could lie better than Nixon and be more concise than some random person I was covering.

In February 1969, 25 years ago, I arrived as a young, terrified PFC on this lonely little hill in Quang Ngai Province. Back then, the place seemed huge and imposing and permanent.

When writing, I'm not thinking about war, even if I'm writing about it. I'm thinking about sentences, rhythm and story. So the focus, when I'm working, even if it's on a story that takes place at war, is not on bombs or bullets. It's on the story.

Place is so important to me. The Midwest is like a ghost in my life. It's present as I look out the window now. I see Texas, but if I close my eyes and look out the same window, I'm back in my hometown in Worthington, Minnesota, and I cherish those values and that diction.

If you stop loving someone, did you ever love them? If you say you're committed and later you're not committed, well, was the first thing commitment? You see what I mean? This kind of thing has always interested me.

Life is never all one thing. It bounces around. Certainly, my own life has.

To be memorable and to have dramatic impact, informational detail must function actively within the dynamic of a story.

My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead.

A place where your life exists before you live it, and where it goes afterwards.

Did I choose this life of illusion? Don't be mad. My bed was made, I just lied in it.

And as a writer now, I want to save Linda's life. Not her body--her life.

When you're so close to material, it would be as if you had come out of a bad marriage. You would be so close to it that you would be paying attention to detail that may not mean a whole lot for the reader.

Life is never all one thing. It bounces around. Certainly, my own life has. Look at Woody Allen's funny movies - all the humor comes out of sad stuff. Sometimes you have to laugh, no matter what life deals you.

Everyone acts stupid at some time in order to be loved.

A lot like yesterday, a lot like never.

I know what it is to feel unloved, to want revenge, to make mistakes, to suffer disappointment, yet also to find the courage to go forward in life.

I received my draft notice right after graduation from college and had three months before going into the Army in September to think about it.

I hated the draft, but at the same time, it's something that made every American take war seriously.

From the year of his birth in 1914 until the outbreak of war in 1941, my father lived in a mostly white, mostly working-class, mostly Irish Catholic neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York.

There's something about being amid the chaos and the horror of a war that makes you appreciate all you don't have - and all you may lose forever.

War is a fundamental aspect of human existence. It's good to know what war entails and what the human sacrifice is.

A small, seemingly inconsequential event can determine a life.

I didn't get into writing to make money or get famous or any of that. I got into it to hit hearts, and man, when I get letters not just from the soldiers but from their kids, especially their kids, it makes it all worthwhile.

The human life is all one thing, like a blade tracing loops on the ice: a little kid, a twenty-three-year-old infantry sergeant, a middle-aged writer knowing guilt and sorrow.